When a person holds an instrument to play, they don’t always intend to produce the resulting sounds. Sometimes they play a single random note–more so with the intent to play than the intent to create pleasant sounds–and another one follows, and another one; initial chaos that eventually becomes an orderly symphony. How can we reproduce this process through code? How can we make randomly pleasant sounds? True randomness is hard to define in reality, and I’m sure the author would argue that the very first notes played by the person in my example, aren’t truly random. He’d argue that they are rather the result of meaningful noise that loses its meaning in a musical context. A ‘random’ function, and even the seemingly natural ‘noise’, are based on randomly occurring physical phenomena–like cosmic radiation or radioactive decay. The thought that some other phenomenon that has a random frequency that resonates with music could exist is fascinating, and I would love to see its applications.

In the meanwhile anything generated randomly on Tidal (even with noise) sounds awful lol.